I'm going to make this easy. If your brown-capped, red-pored, blue-staining bolete was collected under hardwoods east of the Rocky Mountains and has a stem that lacks reticulation but features a finely fuzzy coating over its base, call it "Boletus subvelutipes"--unless you are in the southeastern United States, in which case you should consider Boletus austrinus (stem covered with purple floccules) and Boletus hypocarycinus (basal mycelium white, spores under 12 µ long).

That's pretty much as accurate as you can be--even from a scientific standpoint, unless by "scientific" you really mean, "I want to immerse myself in a mess centered around a 40-year-old treatise of Michigan boletes," or, "I want to apply European species names and concepts to North American boletes despite the fact that the European species probably don't actually occur on our continent." If any of that sounds like fun to you, I've done my best to help you out, starting with couplet #50 of my key to red-pored boletes. Alternatively, you could try entertaining yourself with Smith & Thiers's 1971 key to Stirps subvelutipes. (Alter-alternatively, you could just pound your head into a wall.)

This is an area of bolete taxonomy that needs a lot of work. I encourage you to participate! If you find subvelutipes-like boletes in the woods, why not take careful notes on the ecology, photograph or scan the mushrooms, describe the collection, and preserve your specimens? Described below, and illustrated to the right, are examples representing three rather different subvelutipes-like boletes I have collected.

Note: Of the collections described on this page, this one agrees most closely with Peck's Boletus subvelutipes, as interpreted by Smith & Thiers (1971): its microscopic features match well, as do the yellow brown colors and the yellow dried cap.